Jenna Caplette migrated from California to Montana in the early 1970s, first living on the Crow Indian reservation, then moving to Bozeman where she owned a downtown retail anchor for eighteen years. These days she owns Bozeman BodyTalk & Energetic Healthcare, hosts a monthly movie night, teaches and writes about many topics. 

The weekend of April 12 and 13^th brings the Annual Montana State University American Indian Council Pow Wow. It’s free and open to the public. In fact, visitors are welcomed. 

Pow-wow offers an opportunity to celebrate Montana’s heritage. Since my daughter Rose is half Crow-Indian, the MSU pow-wow has been part of her life since I carried her there in a cradle board.

Basically, a pow-wow is a gathering, a time to meet friends, new people, and to have fun. It’s a celebration of dance and music, of native culture and tradition. Many dances emulate a bird of one kind or another. For instance, traditional Crow-style men dancers emulate the Sage Grouse. In the old days, dances used to be particular by tribe or area, like the Crow Tribe, or the Northern Plains, but now dancers choose the style of dance by what they most enjoy. Their choice, and their way of dancing, express who they are. 

When you watch a pow-wow, notice the different styles of outfits. The easiest to pick out might be women’s jingle dress dancers, outfits covered with metal cones. Plains traditional dancers usually wear buckskin outfits. Crow traditional dancers often wear wool dresses decorated with real or imitation elk-teeth. If a woman is carrying a shawl and wearing a dress decorated with ribbon, she’s probably a fancy dancer.  The shawl is a piece of art by itself.

Some dancers are professionals who travel the pow-wow circuit competing for prize money. They will participate in contest dances, working to get points, to demonstrate their skill. Judges watch them for their participation in the inter-tribal dances as well.

When the announcer calls an inter-tribal, everyone dances, mixing styles of dancing together. It is during an inter-tribal that visitors can participate. First watch for awhile to get the feel for how to dance.  It’s not at all like the dancing from old time Hollywood movies. Then, before you join in, you may want to check in with the arena director or assistants and ask if it’s a good time to do so.

If you want to take photographs, the Grand Entry event, held each night at 6 PM, offers a spectacular photographic opportunity. If you want to photograph a particular dancer, ask the person politely to take their picture. As with any other group of people, some don’t want their picture taken, some won’t mind.

This year’s host drum is “Young Spirit” and there is a contest for best drum group. Rose’s dad is a pow-wow singer. She says. “It makes my dad happy to sing from his heart. He has a passion for pow-wow music.”

When she was small, she used to sit on his lap and drum with him. For her,  “Pow-wow is being the rhythm, the beat of the drums. You dance and you can feel it in your feet and you dance and you’re so proud of yourself.”

We take our best shawls, get ready for the inter-tribal.

Brian D'Ambrosio is a writer/editor living in Missoula.

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Shalene Valenzuela’s ceramic and porcelain art provides much to ponder.

For starters, within her pieces lurks a mild – and at times not so lenient – criticism of
consumption modes, consumerism, societal expectations, etiquette, and delineated
gender roles.

In addition to these themes, her sculptures prod fun at our society’s pervasive
construction of nostalgia as yet another form of relentless consumption.

“A lot of the imagery I’ve pulled from dated sources,” says Valenzuela. “It comes
from the era my mother and grandparents grew up in, from old photos, magazines
and yearbooks, and the advertising of the social, political events of their days. It all
seems so innocent, but that is so far from the truth.”

Through the hand-painting or screen-pressing of symbols, faces, and imagery on
thin, fragile objects, Valenzuela exposes contradictions in advertising, culture, and
society. Beneath the shiny veneer we see that the world is a perpetual caricature
of itself; every moment discloses the contradiction of what we pretend to be. She
understands that the world is a charming inconsistency and that every time we
take a step forward that we, in truth, revert back to the same primitive habits and
patterns. We are programmed that way, we are not only constructed to stand in
opposition to our own selves, but to philosophize our daily conflicts.

What Shalene’s art does so well is to rein in that ambiguity and repetition, or, at very
least, sleekly push those forces out into the open. Indeed, the action taking place in
her narratives relates to “a pattern,” says Valenzuela, “a rut in life,” something we
replicate on a daily basis and do so unquestioningly.

Since much of her imagery is culled from “dated” sources, we see “an idealized
time” in society and advertising. We see fashionable clothing, cookbooks, trendy
hair styles, the latest cosmetics and appliances, the staid pursuit of the inanimate;
the decadent swamp of consumerism bogging citizens down; cosmetics covering
up self-hatred. Valenzuela’s eschews the notion that we must be forced to equate
products and services with our human well-being. And she exposes the roots,
origins, and perhaps (hopefully) the zenith of this madness.

Jabbing holes at fairytales and urban myths through the faces of smiley, yet unhappy
ladies from a Time magazine Tupperware ad may seem a bit brusque to some eyes.
But, in actuality, a variety of women’s issues are executed with a jokey, often ironic
tone.

“It has more to do with the expression and glances on the faces of those painted and
what’s being implied by the actions,” says Valenzuela, who currently serves as the
director at the Clay Studio of Missoula and teaches at Flathead Valley Community
College. “I hope that the imagery of that old advertising captivates, but I would also
like the viewer to investigate more, to investigate those things that you can’t tell or
know from afar.”
 

Shalene’s work is aesthetically beautiful– pretty telephones, seemingly delicate
clay hammers and boards, but it also has a lot of depth, for her pieces explore the
interaction of humanity, nature, and mystery. Everything we see hides another
thing, and we want to see what is hidden by what we see.

While the issues she explores generally delve into the very tangible psychology of
self-esteem and self-perception, she knows full well that true art evokes a feeling of
mystery – a mystery without which the world as a collective entity would not exist.
Her illustrations and their sense of seriousness are real; the attitude or identity of
the subject is guesswork.

To Shalene, art is the practice of supplying content and thought, a method of
provoking a substantive discussion of earlier times and a way to better comprehend
the generally accepted behaviors of the present. It is her way of halting what never
stays still, of pinning down the elusive foe called time.

Valenzuela says, “Really, the art you see comes down to a moment in time, a moment
in time with an implied past and an implied future, which gives the viewer a hint
into the patterns of life. I hope there is more to it than at first glance. In the end, I
hope my art evokes questions about those patterns of life.”